Would you rank DirecTV as one of the least liked companies in the country? What about Charter Communications? AT&T? The Atlantic did, as well as a dozen other businesses in its list of "The 15 Most Hated Companies in America."

The Atlantic claims there's more than an objective analysis going on here, with its rankings based on six different criteria:

Employee opinions

Return to shareholders

Customer surveys

Brand valuation

Press coverage

Public opinion

Several of those look subjective to us, but whatever, it's their story and they can tell it how they like. The Atlantic details why each company made the list; for AT&T, poor 3G service played a big role, while Best Buy was dinged based on recent surveys and poor performance on Wall Street.

Agree with their rankings? Which companies would you add or remove from the list? Hit the jump and sound off!

Cameron Diaz has toppled Jessica Biel as the most dangerous celebrity to search for on the web, according to security technology leviathan McAfee, which has been publishing an annual list of the most dangerous celebrities in cyberspace since 2007. Diaz's rise to the top spot has been meteoric.

Last year, Cameron Diaz was not even among the top 15 celebrities on McAfee's list. An analogy would be an unseeded player winning a tennis grand slam. According to the study, one in every ten web searches for Cameron Diaz is likely to end up in a visit to a malicious site.

Julia Roberts (second), Jessica Biel (third), Brad Pitt (fifth) and Tom Cruise (eighth) are some of the others big names on the list. Having slipped to the very bottom of the rankings, Barack Obama (49) and Sarah Palin (50) are among the safest people to search for on the internet.

Comscore has released its March U.S. search engine market share numbers, and the results might surprise you. While the vast majority of the Internet still turns to Google for search (65.1%), Bing has posted an aggressive share gain hitting a record 11.7%. What's even more interesting is that it turns out most of the hit came from ex-googler's as Yahoo's fortunes also nudged up ever so slightly to 16.9%.

Microsoft's growth in the search engine market has been slow and steady since the Bing rebranding, but its refreshing to see their might actually be some competition left in the search market. Its hard to imagine that this trend could continue indefinitely, but as we all know healthy competition is great news no matter which way you look at it. For those keeping score this is also the tenth straight month of share gains for Bing.

McAfee used its SiteAdvisor technology to crawl the web and test domains for security threats--a total of 27 million domains in all. Overall, McAfee reports that 5.8% of them were a problem. The percentage of risky sites is up over 2007 and 2008, but, McAfee says, because of a change in methodology it’s not possible to say the Internet has become more risky.

The places to avoid? By Top Level Domain (TLD) they are .CM (Cameroon), with a risk factor of 36.7%, .COM (Commercial), 32.3%, .CN (People’s Republic of China), 23.4%, .WS (Samoa), 17.8%, and .INFO (Information), 15.8%. For downloads the worst place to be is .RO (Romania).

The safest places to play on the Internet (and perhaps the least interesting), are .GOV (Government), .JP (Japan), .EDU (Education), .IE (Ireland), and .HR (Croatia).

The Untied States sits toward the top of the risky list, ranked 17th, with a risk ratio of 3.1%.

McAfee also says the likelihood of receiving spam if registering with an email address has dropped from 7.6% to 2.8%. And the percent of sites delivering viruses, spyware or adware has edged down, from 4.7% to 4.5%. (McAfee cautions that this last finding doesn’t mean there are fewer Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) in the tubes, but rather they are getting harder to detect using standard procedures.)

Overall, sites registered in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa are relatively safe. Sites registered in the Asia-Pacific region are not.

A recent ComScore survey on Internet usage is reporting that Microsoft might not be leading the way in search, but in terms of total hours spend online, it has a commanding lead over its competition. The survey, which measured a whopping 27 billion hours of Internet usage by Web users aged 15 or older is an increase of nearly 24% over the year prior, and of those studied, over 3.9 billion hours were spent using Microsoft services. Google came in a not so close second place with around 2.5 billion hours.

The big winner in the Microsoft portfolio might surprise you however, with about 70 percent of the usage being attributed to Windows Live Messenger. Of course, this number measures time spent “online” and not just those “actively engaged” with the service, but it certainly shows the popularity of Microsoft’s instant messenger. Google’s numbers are pretty typical explain analysts, since they make it their business using search to try and get you “in and out” as quickly as possible. The most successful Google property continues to be YouTube with nearly 1.2 billion hours logged watching video.

Yahoo placed third with 1.7 billion hours, and Facebook commanded a respectable fourth place with 1.4 billion hours. The individual rankings may have been a bit of a shock, but the trend showing “Internet usage on the rise” certainly isn’t. Did any of these results surprise you? Let us know what you think.

It has benefited greatly from being on the vanguard of the netbook revolution – Aspire One is the best selling netbook. Its streetwise, efficient sales model can also be credited for its success.

"We collect the order from the customer, place the order with the manufacturer and they ship it," Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci told the New York Times. He added that Acer doesn’t lay its hands on the goods. Dell on the other hand has a plethora of troubles to contend with.